President Joe Biden (D) pardoned his son, Hunter, on December 1, despite saying many times that he wouldn’t grant such a reprieve. The pardon is broad. It sweeps away Hunter’s criminal convictions on tax and gun charges. The pardon came as Hunter was scheduled to appear for sentencing hearings later this month in Delaware and California. In both cases, he faced possible lengthy prison sentences.
As the pardon came on a Sunday just after Thanksgiving, many news outlets are reporting that Biden made the decision over the holiday—this is one Thanksgiving dinner that Saturday Night Live should parody!
Still, it is difficult to believe—despite all the claims from Biden and his White House Press Secretary that he would never do such a thing—that Joe Biden ever intended to let his son go to jail.
A refrain on the Hunter Biden pardon on X is that President Biden “lied.” This is hardly surprising, however; even if one simply considers Second Amendment-related issues, Biden has so clearly been a flagrant and repetitive liar that even mainstream-news outlets called his many statements on, for example, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act untrue.
But Joe Biden didn’t just pardon his son. In his statement explaining the pardon, soon-to-be-former President Biden also blamed the justice system for “selective prosecution” and wielding for a pressure campaign against the president of the United States.
In his statement, Joe Biden said it was clear that his son had been “treated differently” by the Justice Department and was “singled out only because he is my son—and that is wrong.”
Joe Biden even said, “There has been an effort to break Hunter—who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me—and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”
Given all of the actual lawfare that was used against incoming President Donald Trump (R) by members of Biden’s political party, it must have taken a lot of self-control for Trump to call the pardon a “miscarriage of justice.”
The pardon, however, is particularly broad, as it covers offenses “which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in” dating back to the beginning of 2014, which is when Hunter was placed on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company.
In Delaware earlier this year, Hunter had been found guilty of lying about his drug use on a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives form (4473) he completed when he bought a handgun in 2018. This gun was later tossed in a dumpster near a school. Photos of Hunter holding what may have been guns he could not legally possess later showed up in photographs found on his “laptop from hell.”
So, even as President Biden continues to argue that America needs new gun bans and other gun-control laws, he has pardoned his son for illegally purchasing and owning a handgun. The hypocrisy and elitism infused in this intricate and scandalous story is so rich it feels hyperbolic to spell it out.
Perhaps, if there is a silver lining, it is that the Bidens will soon go away—not to jail for Hunter, but then, before long, he won’t be much more than a punchline in some distasteful Washington jokes.
